Approaches to Understanding the Impact of Technologies for Aging in Place: A Mini-Review

Abstract

Background: There are many approaches to evaluating aging-in-place technologies. While there are standard measures for outcomes such as health and caregiver burden, which lend themselves to statistical analysis, researchers have a harder time identifying why a particular information and communication technology (ICT) intervention worked (or not). Objective: The purpose of this paper is to review a variety of methods that can help answer these deeper questions of when people will utilize an ICT for aging in place, how they use it, and most importantly why. This review is sensitive to the special context of aging in place, which necessitates an evaluation that can explore the nuances of the experiences of older adults and their caregivers with the technology in order to fully understand the potential impact of ICTs to support aging in place. Methods: The authors searched both health (PubMed) and technology (ACM Digital Library) venues, reviewing 115 relevant papers that had an emphasis on understanding the use of aging-in-place technologies. This mini-review highlights a number of popular methods used in both the health and technology fields, including qualitative methods (e.g. interviews, focus groups, contextual observations, diaries, and cultural probes) and quantitative methods (e.g. surveys, the experience sampling method, and technology logs). Results: This review highlights that a single evaluation method often is not adequate for understanding why people adopt ICTs for aging in place. The review ends with two examples of multifaceted evaluations attempting to get at these deeper issues. Conclusion: There is no proscriptive formula for evaluating the intricate nuances of technology acceptance and use in the aging-in-place context. Researchers should carefully examine a wide range of evaluation techniques to select those that will provide the richest insights for their particular project.

Origins and consequences of technology acquirement by independent-living seniors: towards an integrative model

“…However, insight in the interplay and dynamics between factors is very limited. As noted by others, we still do not know very much about when, how and why community-dwelling older adults acquire technology [ 19 , 28 – 31 ]. Additionally, from both a healthcare and business perspective, the ultimate goal is to develop and deploy technologies that contribute to the quality of life of older adults [ 29 , 30 , 32 ].…”

Insights Into Older Adult Patient Concerns Around the Caregiver Proxy Portal Use: Qualitative Interview Study (Preprint)

“…Connelly et al have found that evaluation of ICTs for aging in place requires multiple methods because of the wide variety of nuanced contexts in which older adults live [3]. Lyles et al showed that lack of technical support and the fear of losing the doctorpatient relationship were barriers to adoption of patient portals for AfricanAmerican and Latino patients [4,5].…”

A Systematic Review of Literature Reporting on Studies Analysing Technologies for Ageing in Place to Support Community-Dwelling Older Adults

“…In this context, technologies for ageing in place (Pastalan, 1990;Connelly, Mokhtari and Falk, 2014;Normie, 2011) are important facilitators. This study is part of a medium-term project that aims to systematize current evidence of technologies for ageing in place (Queirós, Pereira, Dias and Rocha, 2017;Queirós, Pereira, Santos and Rocha, 2017;Queirós, Santos, Cerqueira and Rocha, 2017) and its main goal was to report technological solutions to support community-dwelling older adults.…”